In recent years, mobile wireless communications have become increasingly popular. Initial implementations of mobile wireless communications, for example in the form of cellular telephone networks, supported circuit switched voice communication services. Mobile voice telephone communication is now ubiquitous in many countries, and mobile services are replacing fixed landline service even for traditional voice telephone calls. However, for many years now the mobile service offerings have extended far beyond the traditional voice telephone call model. For example, the mobile carriers developed short messaging service (SMS) technology to provide text and/or email communications via the wireless communication networks. As the public wireless communication networks have evolved to provide greater bandwidth and packet based services, the industry has developed a variety of data services, such as web browsing, as well as a variety of services using multimedia messaging service (MMS) technology. Many of the messaging services such as SMS and MMS support message traffic between mobile stations, e.g. for message exchange between users. However, these popular messaging services also support traffic between mobile stations and server equipment from which service providers offer users a variety of different types of application services. With the increased data communication capability of the network and the associated increased intelligence of the mobile devices, mobile messaging has extended to include instant messaging and email, services. These messaging services support communications of messages between mobile devices as well as two-way communications between mobile devices and applications running on network-connected computer platforms, such as servers running appropriate applications.
For most message traffic, the communication is point-to-point, e.g. from one mobile device to another mobile device, even if an intermediate server computer provides a store-and-forward function in support of message delivery. Companies and other organizations, however, may have the need to multicast (i.e. sequentially transmit a message to multiple recipients) a message to a group of mobile devices in various situations. The multicast may be directed to many mobile devices that are listed in a group distribution list. For example, a bank may send a security alert or update to their account holders. The security alert may be sent in a multicast fashion to each individual mobile device. This multicast transmission is a sequential transmission from the server to each mobile device specified in the group, as opposed a unicast transmission where the data would be transmitted from the server directly to a single specified mobile device. As another example, a school system may need to notify teachers, other employees and parents, of a school system closing due to inclement weather.
However, in current multicast methods, the message may only be delivered to a short list of mobile devices since the multicast is performed by the sending enterprise itself. This limitation on the number of mobile devices is primarily due to hardware/software limitations in the systems of the sending enterprise. The bank in this example would have to send a message in a sequential manner to each individual mobile device, thereby consuming valuable resources and a large amount of time in delivering the messages. Furthermore, the bank would have to receive (on an individual basis) a status message from each of the mobile devices indicating whether the mobile device has received a message or not.
The conventional solution to performing multicast messaging to a large number of mobile devices is inefficient since it places the large burden of delivering the messages on the customer (i.e., the bank or school system in our examples). Each sending customer has to have complex hardware/software systems in place to perform this multicast in a sequential manner (e.g. phone number by phone number basis) to each of the recipients in the group. This can result in long delay times in transmitting multicast messages to groups of recipients, and require large capital investments by the customers to purchase and maintain such hardware/software systems.